Cate Blanchett, Peter Sarsgaard And Andrew Dice Day Talk Blue Jasmine

In a recent press conference in LA for Woody Allen’s new film, Blue Jasmine, actress Cate Blanchett (Jasmine), Peter Sarsgaard (Dwight) and Andrew Dice Day (Augie) spoke about  the film and their characters.

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For all three of you, how do you approach in general a project or a role, and then specifically this project?

Blanchett:  I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t have a particular process.  I think that the material, the director, the other actors, reveals what you need to do.  And Woody was very much about it being alive.  He wasn’t interested in anyone’s homework.  But obviously, as you were alluding to, the material is so dense.  Sally and I, in particular, who I think were the only two people that got the full script, talked a lot about the backstory and how that can inform the subtext.  But it was a fascinating thing to play different aspects of Jasmine with different people, where she was an entirely different person.

Peter Sarsgaard:  I had no idea what was going on.  I mean, I’d only read my small part which is completely isolated from the rest of the story.  So I thought that Cate had lost her mind, and my job was to help her.  In terms of preparing for this role, there was very little preparation, partly because I knew so little.  My wardrobe was a very significant thing because it was one of the few things that I had before I started.  I remember getting my wardrobe which is all Ralph Lauren.  My underwear is Ralph Lauren.  My socks are Ralph Lauren.

Blanchett: Welcome to Woody’s world.

Sarsgaard:  Which is like what my father wears.  So I started feeling kind of uncomfortable in the fact that you have to wear that clothing in a certain way which really reminded me of my father.

Clay:  You know what?  I felt the same way.  Yeah, I felt the same way with the clothing.  It really puts you in the character you have to play, because even as a stage performer, I have my garb which is leather jackets and black jeans to make me feel a certain way.  The wardrobe is really important to feeling the character you’re playing.

Blanchett:  And also, it really helped the chronology, too.  You can look at it and think, “Oh, they’re contemporary clothes,” but Suzy was really incredible.

Did either of you keep your wardrobe?

Clay:  I didn’t want my wardrobe.  (laughter)

Cate, the first thing I thought of was Mrs. Madoff when I was watching your character.  Did you research her or other women that have been socialites and have fallen on hard times?

Blanchett:  Oh, yeah, there’s a lot of people who’ve fallen from grace.  Yes, of course, I mean, that’s part of my job and part of the pleasure of my job.  I’d followed the Madoff scandal like everybody.  There’s a whole other mini-series in that fiasco.  And that wasn’t what Woody was [after].  He didn’t specifically base it on that.  So it wasn’t her story.  There are many, many stories like that.  I thought about a lot characters both fictional and real, and then you have to play Woody’s script because the characters are so beautifully, particularly drawn in the writing.  I mean, that’s where the majority of his directing happens is in the script.

What about preparing to play someone who is suffering from mental illness?  Did you do any special research for that?

Blanchett:  Yes, obviously, I’m not so method that I went and took Xanax every night, but it’s amazing the things you find on YouTube.  So yes, it was important for me to chart through when she’d taken a Xanax.  How many she’d taken.  If she’d mixed it with alcohol, and what the physical and mental effects would be.  And also, what I was trying to seed was just that sense that when she was beginning to have a panic attack was when she might break out in a sweat, but yet everything else is completely fine.  So her physical state, and her psychological state, they were kind of interesting balls to try and juggle.

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You mentioned that every actor hopes to get the call from Woody Allen.  For each of you, what was the situation?  Was it a call from him, his casting director?  And what was your reaction to being told that Woody Allen wants to meet you?

Clay:  Well, I thought it was a joke because I was just in New York performing and my manager called me.  And I said, “All right.  I got to pack.  I’m coming home tomorrow.”  He goes, “No, really.  Woody Allen wants to meet with you tomorrow.”  So I got very excited about it because it’s not like I’ve been banging out film after film lately, and so yeah, just to walk in and meet him and say hello would have been great.  But the fact that he’s standing there and he’s going, “Would you read some pages for me?”  And I’m like, “Well, that’s what I’m here for, right?”  And the minute we went through it, we just started talking about other things.  And that was it, but it was thrilling.  I mean, it’s nothing less than thrilling to work with a guy like that.

Sarsgaard:  My wife was very pregnant, and I’m sort of waiting for the baby to come at night.  I got a call from my agent to come and meet him.  I’d met him once before years ago onEveryone Says I Love You.  So I knew what the meeting was going to be like.  I knew it would be a little bit like an x ray.  And I walked in, and he was incredibly affable actually.  And he said, “So we’re doing this film this summer, and there’s a part we thought you might be right for, and are you doing anything?”  And I said, “I’m having a baby.”  And he said, “Well, are you doing anything else?”  And I said, “No,” because I hadn’t been planning on working.  And he said, “It’s not going to take very much time, and we’ll send the script over to your house.”  The pages actually were sent over to my house, just for my character.  I actually had trouble concentrating on the pages as I was reading them because I was like, “Of course, I’m going to do this?  Why am I even…?  What am I doing?  There’s a woman waiting to get this back.  I should just give it back to her.  She’s been sitting there a while.”  I’ve just always wanted to be in a Woody Allen movie.  I’ve been a huge fan forever.  I wanted to know what it was like.

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Did you relate to these characters?

Clay:  I did in a lot of ways, and I really loved Woody’s writing because he sort of sets me up, my character up as like a really bad guy.  You hear a line come out like, “I heard he used to hit his wife,” and by the end of the movie – which I didn’t even know because I never saw the script other than my lines – you realize this is really a good guy that just got destroyed by this woman and her husband.  So it was real interesting to play that because, even when I first met with Woody, and I asked him, “Is there something you can give?” – because you know, he just gives you a couple of pages.  And I’m like, “But can you give me something to go on?”  And he goes, “Well, just look at it.”  He goes, “He might . . . he’s drunk.  He hits his wife.”  And that’s not my character in the movie.  But he sets it up through other characters, and then by the end you really feel for that guy because this was just a good guy in love with his wife, whose wife was really the drunk and bouncing from guy to guy.  And so, it’s just the way he sets up how to get the compassion for these different characters.  And what was great about Cate’s character is every day when you drive around, and you see street bums and people babbling to themselves, I mean, we’ve all said it at one time or another, “How did that person become like that?”  So, to see the journey she takes through this movie is really interesting, because you do think of those things when you see somebody on a corner or walking down the street just talking to themselves.  The people we all walk away from, and you go, “How does that happen?”  You’re born.  You’re a baby.  You have a family.  You grow up.  How does that happen?  By her not having an identity of her own through this movie, other than the men she lives through and their lives, was driving her crazy.  So it was interesting just to watch that process even more than my own part.

Sarsgaard:  I have a lot of compassion for his character.

Clay:  I felt really bad for Peter.

Sarsgaard:  I have so much compassion for his character.  I mean, the one question, the only question I ever really asked Woody directly about my character was, I remember the day when I proposed marriage, I said, “Really?  Like to her?  Why am I?  Where is this coming from?”  And he said, “You want a wife.”  I went, “Right.  Okay.  I want a wife.”  And now watching the film, I realized that the audience meets me.  People start rooting for her to be with me, knowing nothing about me except that I’m wealthy.  I’m like a life raft.  There’s no like, love thing that kicks off there.  It’s just I wear clothes that look like I’m a wealthy person.  I actually have the quality of someone who’s not only wealthy, but very comfortable in it, and I’m ambitious.  So I figured, it made me play someone who was rather shallow, somebody who would ask someone to marry them just because they look right.  They look like a great person to stand next to you.  They seem reasonable enough to get along with, like we get along well enough.  I like you.  You’re nice to talk to, but there’s a lot of stuff that I’m ignoring.  The real gist of what’s going on with her is something that, I as an actor, kept going like, I must just have this very dominant flavor that’s coming off of her of insanity that I’m just letting drift away and going, “But once you take your pills, it’s going to be great.”  (laughter)  As I watch the film, not knowing the rest of the script, I do see the way that I kind of create this expectation of safe passage, and then we all realize, “Oh, what she needs is not actually money again.”  That’s not really what’s going to save her, a guy like this.

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